Xinhua’s space yearender reads like a science roundup, but it is really a capability statement. Space is the cleanest theatre for showing state capacity because reality does not accept spin. The signal is industrial sovereignty: build, test, fail, fix, repeat. Reusable rockets and deep space missions are not romance. They are proof of institutions that can plan beyond the next cycle
Western headlines claim China is bypassing chip export controls. A close reading of Chinese and Taiwanese sources tells a different story: slow progress, rising costs, and no proven evidence of illicit upgrades. This analysis separates verifiable fact from allegation and explains what China’s DUV based strategy actually achieves.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) / China / United States
Trillions in market value and hundreds of billions in infrastructure spending rest on one assumption: scarcity. China’s open model push is testing whether that assumption can survive.
China / Technology / United States
Donald Trump has reopened the door for Nvidia’s H200 sales to approved customers in China. Beijing’s response is not to celebrate but to ration access, shield Huawei and deepen its own AI hardware stack. This article follows on from our investigation into offshore Chinese model training and explains how both Washington and Beijing now run export style controls on the same chip.
Hong Kong’s deadliest tower fire in decades is being sold in Western coverage as a tale of bad contractors and ageing residents. In reality it is the late stage of a British colonial housing model that still treats land as a revenue machine, squeezes people into unsafe estates, and now compares badly with the space and security most families in Shanghai, Beijing and Nanning enjoy.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) / China
China’s artificial intelligence giants are not only dodging United States export controls. They are also navigating Beijing’s clampdown on Nvidia. New rules that bar fresh Nvidia deployments in Chinese data centres are pushing Alibaba, ByteDance and DeepSeek to rent GPU farms in Singapore and Malaysia, even as they are forced to build a parallel stack on Huawei and other domestic chips at home.
Japan’s new prime minister has forced a choice that Tokyo spent decades avoiding. By calling a Taiwan conflict a threat to Japan’s survival, Sanae Takaichi has pleased Washington and enraged Beijing while riding high in the polls at home. Behind the drama sits a harder project that links whitewashed war memory, rearmed forces and a disposable foreign workforce.
China’s boycott of Japan is not about crowded temples or lost hotel bookings. It is a response to a Japanese prime minister speaking of force in a conflict that touches Chinese territory, against the backdrop of tens of millions of Chinese dead in the last war. Beijing is using tourism to show that history and economic power now move together.
China is often portrayed as the world’s leading polluter, yet the numbers tell another story. The United States and Europe burned through most of the planet’s carbon budget to industrialise and preserve their prosperity. An average American still uses almost three times more energy than a Chinese citizen. By any fair per-person and historical measure, the West remains the greatest emitter, and China’s industrialisation is occurring at a fraction of that cost.
China’s CV-18 Fujian has entered service as the world’s second electromagnetic-catapult carrier, ending decades of U.S. monopoly in carrier aviation. It marks the moment China’s navy moved from coastal defence to blue-water power projection, fielding stealth fighters, early-warning aircraft, and an all-domestic strike group. The Fujian is more than a ship it is Beijing’s declaration that parity with the U.S. Navy has arrived.
British commentators often mistake sentiment for evidence when writing about China. Behind the emotion lies a more complex reality a multiethnic state balancing growth, control, and the legacy of violence it claims to have subdued. From mosque restorations to militant spillovers in Syria, the story of Xinjiang is not one of moral clarity but of power, order, and contested memory in an age of selective outrage.
Artificial Intelligence (AI) / China
While Beijing executes a three-stage national plan that defines artificial intelligence as civilisational infrastructure, Washington and London are still improvising with memos and committees. China is aligning technology, governance and diplomacy into one machine. The West still debates ethics while Beijing writes the rules of the intelligent age.
The real story is industrial rather than conspiratorial. Faced with the vulnerability of foreign supply, China spent the past decade mastering the metallurgy, forging and testing of high speed rail wheels.
Europe used wartime powers to seize control of Nexperia. The move claims to defend security yet it signals the surrender of economic sovereignty to Washington. In an extraordinary act of economic self sabotage, the Dutch government used emergency wartime powers to take control of Nexperia, a major semiconductor producer based in the Netherlands and owned […]
Britain’s argument over China’s new embassy has become a mirror held up to its own insecurities. Commentators and newspapers now claim that Beijing plans to build spy rooms and tunnels under London to intercept fibre optic cables, as though the Royal Mint Court site were an outpost of a Cold War thriller. These fantasies are […]
China’s premier and Russia’s envoy flank Kim Jong-un at Pyongyang’s 80th Workers’ Party parade, signalling a new Eurasian power geometry where missiles meet diplomacy and isolation turns into leverage
The United States sought to cripple China’s semiconductor sector with sweeping export bans. Instead, the embargo triggered an unprecedented mobilization across China’s industry, universities, and state planners. Within three years, Beijing had rebuilt its chip ecosystem, advanced its AI capacity, and turned an intended chokehold into the architecture of technological self-reliance.
In capitals from Addis Ababa to Brasília, diplomats speak of Chinese loans and infrastructure, of classrooms where Mandarin now competes with English. In Delhi, Jakarta, and Johannesburg, scholars debate whether China’s approach — state-led, disciplined, outward-looking — offers a workable alternative to the American order that has framed global politics since 1945.
Embedded video under YouTube license — Creator of this video: Woodford from Woodford Videos. Follow him. BEIJING — The announcement came on an overcast September morning, delivered not with fanfare but with the clipped precision of a government communiqué: China’s Ministry of Commerce would launch an “anti-discrimination investigation” into American tariffs, export controls and restrictions […]
Soviet-era MiG-19s (China: J-6) Licensed from the USSR in 1958 and mass-produced in China as the Shenyang J-6. Over 4,500 built; thousands retired and stockpiled since the 1990s. Estimates suggest up to ~3,000 retired J-6 airframes available for drone conversion. China is converting thousands of its retired Cold War–era J-6 fighter jets into pilotless drones, […]
BEIJING — China’s leadership on September 19 delivered one of its clearest warnings yet to Washington: cooperate on equal terms, or brace for a rupture that will hurt not only the world’s two largest economies but the global system they anchor. In remarks and statements that departed from the usual layers of diplomatic restraint, Beijing […]
Lieutenant General He Lei, retired vice-president of the PLA Academy of Military Sciences, shown in uniform at a Beijing forum. Source: CGTN (state media). A retired Chinese general has declared that Beijing could achieve unification with Taiwan using conventional weapons alone, even as analysts say last month’s military parade hinted at the development of a […]
When Vladimir V. Putin stepped onto the red carpet in Tianjin last weekend, the choreography was as carefully managed as any in the long history of Sino-Russian relations. The Russian leader’s arrival for the 25th Shanghai Cooperation Organization (SCO) summit was not merely a diplomatic courtesy. It was an act of political theater, crafted to […]
BEIJING, Sept. 3, 2025 — At dawn tomorrow, Beijing’s storied Tiananmen Square will awaken to a spectacle of steel and stride, as the People’s Liberation Army stages its largest military parade in nearly a decade. This grand display—slated to mark the 80th anniversary of the end of World War II in Asia—will bring together tens […]
Take the case of a young reservist — let’s call him Daniel R. — who fought in Operation Defensive Shield more than two decades ago. In recent months, he has begun to speak publicly about the psychic pain that has shadowed him ever since. His story is not unique, yet it resonates far beyond his […]